Is your health technology company publishing content online, but you aren’t seeing any results? Maybe you want to increase leads and grow your brand awareness and social media presence. Do you have a health tech content marketing plan in place? If yes, how effective is it? If you aren’t sure how your health tech digital marketing is producing ROI, then a few tips might help.
Healthcare is a sensitive industry where you must provide credible information to users. The COVID-19 pandemic surged the search for medical-related information online, making healthcare content marketing stay on top of the game and boost sales to healthcare businesses.
While health tech companies are creating incredible products and technology that have positively impacted the way we do healthcare, there’s simply too much competition in the industry today to do marketing without a plan. You must have a well-planned and executed content marketing strategy to remain competitive. Let’s explore what’s a content plan, the benefits of a health tech content marketing plan, and secrets to set one up for future success.
What Is a Health Tech Content Marketing Plan, Anyway?
A content marketing plan is a strategy of organizing and publishing high-value content that encourages your audience to take action. It involves laying out your goals, vision, and mission and identifying the gaps to create content that resonates with your buyer persona.
Every health tech company wants their content to inspire people to buy their solution, but most of them make at least one of the following mistakes that prevent it from working:
- Digital health leaders are still focusing on product-centric content and pure sales collateral instead of human-centric content and thought leadership
- Some health tech companies don’t understand how their buyers make decisions
- Their content does not provide the answers people are looking for
- They have many channels, but they don’t know what kind of content works best where
Without a plan, content marketing is done on the fly. If you’ve ever made any of the above mistakes, then you need a content marketing plan.
Benefits of a Health Tech Content Marketing Plan
In today’s digital world, if someone starts to appreciate the importance of health and wellness, what do you think they do first? They go online to search for answers. That is why health tech content marketing is so powerful.
According to Becker’s Hospital Review, there are around a billion healthcare-related searches a day. Over 90% of healthcare patients source online reviews when looking for providers and professionals. This puts health tech companies in a better position to have an online presence and provide answers to customers’ questions through content marketing.
A content marketing plan helps health tech companies in the following ways:
- Align content work with the company’s objectives to help content teams focus on work that matters
- Easy to coordinate teams and schedule timelines
- Provides a framework for easier communication among team members
- Well-crafted health tech content plan helps the content team to quickly adapt and respond to current events that resonate with the audience
- Create brand awareness
- Create SEO-optimized content that catches the attention of local search traffic
- Generate long-term leads that convert
- Establish thought leadership opportunities
- Educate your prospects on your products and services
- Differentiate from the competition and establish a loyal client base
Tips for an Effective Health Tech Content Marketing Plan
Now that we have set the stage as to why a health tech content marketing plan is so important, let’s dive into some of the top secrets you should be using to get the most out of your health tech content marketing:
1. Set Your Objectives
Get a firm understanding of your company’s mission and define your objectives. If you don’t tie your content marketing strategy to SMART goals your team will be held accountable for, you will never know whether or not it is successful.
Your marketing should not happen randomly. A blog post here, a google Ad there, and a few social media posts over there aren’t going to accelerate your content marketing success. Your consistent, planned, purposeful plan should be rooted in your core objectives and beliefs.
2. Understand Your Ideal Customers
Getting to know the people who will be searching for your products or services is vital in creating a marketing plan. The health tech industry is vast and complex. There are many players involved, some with a hand in patient care, hospital operations, finance, and technology.
Instead of marketing to every potential buyer out there, it’s far better to target your content at places that make the best fit for your solutions. If you sell to hospitals, targeting your content to a general audience just won’t help. However, you may need to reach other party players like the clinical directors and clinicians even if you’re selling a tech product. There may be many users you may not be aware you’re influencing in some way. Thus, understanding your ideal customers helps you to produce content that speaks to them.
Define your target market, channels to reach them, who influences them, their problems, and how they will find you. Identify your buyer persona and keep your content focused on that buyer’s key needs.
3. Develop Your Buyer Persona
After identifying your ideal buyers, you want to explore and create a buyer persona profile. Segment your target market and get to know the decision-makers in your ideal buyer segment that have the purchasing power to move forward with the buying of your products or services.
You can outline things like job titles, locations, and information sources to narrow down to people in your target market and identify their main challenges so you can help solve their problems. Be sure to look at demographic information, but avoid information gathered from a few conversations with customers and/or your sales team.
4. Set Marketing Goals and KPIs
Your content marketing initiatives should be tied to SMART goals – that are measurable, specific, attainable, relevant, and timely. Start with your company mission, then break it down into realistic goals that you can achieve within a short time, specifically not more than three months.
After setting your goals, you need to have key performance indicators tied to them. Through KPIs, you get to know whether you’re meeting your goals or not. Every KPI should have an activity and effectiveness metric. For instance, an activity metric would be something like, “We had four paid Ads this month,” and the effectiveness metric could be “60% of our website traffic is from those paid Ads.”
Make sure to share your goals with the entire content marketing team so that everybody is on the same page. This way, you’ll see how you’re moving toward your goals while keeping your team accountable.
5. Assess Your Current Content
What does your current content look like? What marketing activities are you currently promoting? Audit your current content to see how you can repurpose it. For instance, you may have an old article that could be repurposed into a downloadable white paper. Evaluating all of your past efforts and deciding how you can use them for the current plan is one of the keys to your success. Additionally, having a content production schedule will help seal any gaps and help your team to stay on track.
When creating or repurposing content, create with patient care in mind. No matter who your buyers are, their customers are always the patients. Even if you’re targeting executives, make sure your content focuses on the industry’s main goal of improving patient health.
Final Thoughts: Attract More and Better Prospects with Your Health Tech Content Marketing
Once you have your effective content marketing plan in place, you need to create a content marketing strategy to promote that content and start attracting your prospects. Some of the channels you can utilize for your health tech content marketing are email, organic website content, social media, and pay-per-click. Pay-per-click health tech marketing is effective for re-targeting your buyer persona.
Creating content for health tech audiences requires industry knowledge and effort. When done well, you can use this content across different channels in your marketing strategy to create an effective message.
For help with your health tech content marketing plan and strategy, chat with the sales team at nDash to learn more about how our content creation services can help you.
About the author
This post is by nDash community member Lilian Muliti, a digital marketing consultant and content writer for B2B and B2C companies. Learn more about her, her experience, and how her expertise can help you reach your content creation goals by visiting her profile.